Research by three University of Oxford scientists (and one Russian scientist) has shown that Arctic rewilding using large herbivores such as bison and horses is economically viable and could slow the rate of climate change if implemented at scale. The research team, which includes Ecosulis Nature Recovery Lead and University of Oxford Honorary Research Associate Dr. Paul Jepson, believe the results of their research now justify practical experimentation.

The groundbreaking results were published in a paper
in the January edition of the Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions B. Their relevance is heightened by the UK's hosting of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November, and a growing awareness of the importance and potentially huge benefits of implementing natural climate solutions (NCS).

NCS are part of the wider framework of so-called nature-based solutions, which involve working with nature to help address societal challenges.

"The recovery of nature through rewilding, and the associated enhancement of nature-based solutions, is increasingly being accepted as a highly effectively way of addressing climate change," explains Jepson. "As the publication of this new paper shows, UK-based scientists and rewilding-focused consultancies such as Ecosulis are now taking the lead in this regard."

Pivotal permafrost

Arctic and subarctic regions will have a huge role to play in how climate change manifests itself over the coming decades. The gradual thawing of the permafrost - the permanently frozen soil of the Arctic - would release enormous quantities of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) into the atmosphere.

The authors of the new paper estimate that carbon emissions from thawing permafrost could be around 4.35 billion metric tonnes per year over the course of the 21st
century. This is around half as much as fossil fuels emissions, and three times more than estimates of the emissions produced by current and projected land use change. Keeping these gases locked up, or at least locked up for longer, is therefore critical to climate change mitigation efforts, and it is here that rewilding can help.

The herbivore effect

During the Pleistocene period (roughly 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago), extensive areas of the Arctic were covered with grassland - this was naturally grazed by herds of bison, horses, woolly rhinoceros and mammoths. But when humans moved into these so-called "mammoth steppe" areas, unsustainable levels of hunting meant populations of these megafauna collapsed, and some became extinct. As a result, the grassland gave way to boggy, peat-forming vegetation.

Arctic rewilding would reverse this process, with the introduction of large herbivores such as bison and horses leading to the removal of woody vegetation and stimulating grass growth. This, in turn, would increase the amount of incoming solar energy reflected back to space (through the so-called albedo effect) by opening up the landscape. By trampling on the snow in search of winter forage, the animals would also allow colder temperatures to freeze the soil to a deeper level in winter.

The cumulative effect of all these changes would be a net cooling of Arctic lands, delaying the thawing of the permafrost and keeping its greenhouse gases in storage for longer.

Visionary thinking

To stabilise the Earth's climate and limit the temperature increase to below 2°C - in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement - there is an immediate need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester more atmospheric carbon. As COP26 co-host, the UK now has a unique opportunity to ensure that climate change mitigation actions, including NCS, are urgently scaled up.

While the authors of the new paper acknowledge the huge challenges involved in Arctic rewilding, they also believe this visionary approach could effectively complement other NCS.

"The Arctic is already changing, and fast," says lead author Dr. Marc Macias-Fauria, Head of the Biogeosciences Group at Oxford University's School of Geography and the Environment. "Taking a 'do nothing' approach now is a decision to allow rapid, irreversible changes to occur. Although the science of Arctic rewilding is largely untested, it has the potential to make a big difference. Action in this region should certainly be given serious consideration."

"Today governments are spending millions on carbon capture research with very little to show for it," adds Dr. Paul Jepson. "Bold rewilding experiments such as the one proposed in this paper would create new opportunities for addressing climate change. The idea of restoring ecological systems damaged by our distant ancestors to help cool the climate surely has to be worth investigating."

Number crunching

Pleistocene Park, a grassland restoration project currently operating in northeastern Russia, has already shown how Arctic rewilding might work. To further demonstrate what could be achieved, the authors of the new paper propose practical experiments at a larger scale.

The team used fossil records to estimate the density of various animals on the mammoth steppe during the Pleistocene - these included 1 mammoth, 5 bison, 7.5 horses and 15 reindeer per square kilometre. They propose using bison and horses for initial rewilding efforts, with the combined cost of creating and monitoring three, large-scale experimental areas hosting 1,000 animals over a 10-year period estimated to be US$114 million.

On a yearly basis, the team calculate these areas could keep up to 72,000 tonnes of carbon in the ground and generate US$360,000 in carbon revenues alone, with this figure increasing once the research phase was conducted and scaling enabled greater cost efficiency. These returns could be significantly higher if Arctic countries introduced carbon tax and pricing mechanisms.

In the face of such figures, Dr. Paul Jepson believes Arctic rewilding demands further exploration.

"The logistics, costs and social considerations of landscape-scale Arctic rewilding would, admittedly, be huge," says the Ecosulis Nature Recovery Lead. "But as our focus on natural climate solutions sharpens and the need to take decisive climate change mitigation action intensifies, the payoff could be mammoth."

As a leading ecological consultancy and contractor with significant rewilding expertise, Ecosulis
restores habitats and enhances biodiversity at sites across the United Kingdom. Underpinned by our investment in cutting edge research, innovation and technology, we work on landscape-scale projects that support wild nature, add value for our clients and benefit wider society. For more details please visit www.ecosulis.co.uk.

Rewilding offers solutions to our current climate and nature emergencies. Today 15 leading European rewilding organisations are calling for a wilder Europe and the inclusion of rewilding in the European Green Deal and EU Biodiversity Strategy post-2020.

A call to collaborate

As part of a collaboration between 15 leading European rewilding organisations, Ecosulis has today co-released a "Call to Action for a Wilder Europe". Recognising the significant potential of rewilding to rebuild natural abundance, sequester carbon, reduce the risk of flooding and wildfires and contribute to social and economic wellbeing, the document calls for a wide range of actors to collaborate in working towards a wilder Europe. This includes everyone from citizens and entrepreneurs to financiers and land managers.

Together with other co-signatories, Ecosulis invites all organisations, rewilding initiatives, action groups, NGOs, scientific institutions and companies to endorse the call to action and share it with others by using the image below along with the hashtag #CallForAWilderEurope
and a link to the "Call to Action for a Wilder Europe" page.

"Today we have a historic opportunity to rebuild ecosystems in ways that will enrich the lives of every European," says Ecosulis Nature Recovery Lead Dr. Paul Jepson, who played an instrumental role in drawing up the call to action at a gathering of rewilding experts in Spain in early November. "With this document we are reaching out to people from all walks of life and asking them to help co-design a vision for a wilder Europe."

Seizing the moment

The release of the call to action is particularly timely. Yesterday the incoming commissioner for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, presented a draft of the new environmental EU law in Brussels. At Ecosulis we believe the final version of the deal should contain far more ambitious ecological recovery and climate change targets, and that it should embrace and support rewilding as an innovative conservation approach that is already delivering impressive results across Europe.

"The restoration of ecosystems such as wood-pasture mosaics and the reconnection of river channels with their washlands are some of the most cost-effective ways of addressing climate change and creating new natural assets that benefit people and wildlife," he continues. "EU policy must recognise this and provide a far more supportive environment for practical rewilding."

Rewilding principles

Central to the call to action is a set of European rewilding principles (viewable on the call to action page) that were also drawn up at the November gathering in Spain. The aim of both documents is to increase the scale, momentum and unity of practical and grounded rewilding in Europe.

The establishment of rewilding principles will help to define what is different and special about rewilding, providing coherence, inspiration and transparency, and position rewilding in relation to other conservation approaches.

"These principles will not only create a framework of goals, approaches and obligations, but allow flexibility in the implementation of practical rewilding measures," says Dr. Paul Jepson.

Nature-based solutions are now receiving increasing attention in political and policy discourse, with 2020-2030 declared the UN Decade on Ecological Restoration.

"This creates an opportunity and imperative to contribute rewilding principles that can translate aspirational words into practical action," adds Jepson.

Press contacts

For more information about the "Call to Action for a Wilder Europe" and rewilding principles, please contact Dr. Paul Jepson (paul.jepson@ecosulis.co.uk /+44 (0)7741669822).

About Ecosulis

As a leading ecological consultancy and contractor with significant rewilding expertise, Ecosulis
restores habitats and enhances biodiversity at sites across the United Kingdom. Underpinned by our investment in cutting edge research, innovation and technology, we work on landscape-scale projects that support wild nature, add value for our clients and benefit wider society.

Notes for journalists

The following organisations have endorsed the "Call to Action for a Wilder Europe" on its release:

A pioneering new study, carried out by a team of scientists from the UK, Portugal and Brazil, has used a culturomics-based approach to rank the frequency with which scientific bird names appear online. The results show how culturomics - the study of human culture through the analysis of words appearing in enormous digital databases - could be used to evaluate global public interest in any particular conservation-related subject. This could be of enormous benefit to those involved in protecting and recovering nature.

The analysis, which has just been published in the British Ecological Society journal People and Nature, reveals four factors that explain why some bird species have more prominence in culture than others.

Firstly, they have been known to science longer. This is perhaps unsurprising as it is likely that naturalists described the most culturally important, extraordinary or common species first.

Secondly, they are more conspicuous either because they are large, or are active during the day, or both.

Thirdly, they are species with which humans have directly interacted with over the decades through activities such as birdkeeping and hunting.

And finally, they are mainly found in countries where there is widespread use of the Internet.

The study also revealed that only a small proportion of the world's 12,000 bird species are well known, with nine out of ten species generating few if any mentions.

Implications for conservation

Until recently it has only been possible to identify which bird (and other wildlife) species people know about through limited questionnaires. But over the last five years the team involved with the new study has developed innovative internet analysis techniques which can rank differences in the prominence of species names on the internet. The team figured that people are most likely to generate internet content about species that are prominent in their outlook on the world, a characteristic they term "cultural salience".

The accurate determination of cultural salience has wider implications for how we attempt to rescue and restore wildlife populations across the world.

"While the Internet is clearly not a perfect representation of global culture, our finding that birds famous in Victorian times remain famous today suggests that cultural interest in nature moves slowly," says Professor Richard Ladle, lead author of the study. "This is significant because it illustrates the challenge of raising awareness of threatened species discovered in more recent times."

Dr. Paul Jepson, study co-author and Nature Recovery Lead at ecological consultancy and contractor Ecosulis, believes that the team's research could promote new ways of conducting and engaging people in conservation.

"Our techniques can be used to identify wildlife species with the characteristics to become famous, to map 'hotspots' of well-known endangered species, and identify links between countries where they are famous and where they are endangered," says Jepson. "Such knowledge could improve conservation planning and fundraising.

"Our research also raises the question of whether conservation resources should be focused on saving threatened (but maybe less well-known) species, or whether a proportion should be directed at recovering well-known species across their former ranges," he continues.

Feathered favourites

While the top-100 lists of species generated by culturomics techniques make for interesting discussion, the research team point out that these should be read with a note of caution.

"There is significant language variation on the Internet, which is dominated by English language content," explains Dr Ricardo Correia of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, who developed the techniques to extract, clean and analyse the data. "We used scientific names to minimise these biases. However, we currently lack a technique to reliably check that some scientific names don't also have popular meanings.

"Our technique is designed to analyse relationships in large data sets, rather than generate robust league tables of the presence of species on the Internet," he continues. "Nevertheless, these tables are fascinating and will improve as the research develops."

Rank

Scientific name

Common name

1

Gallus gallus

Chicken

2

Tyto alba

Barn owl

3

Corvus corax

Raven

4

Sturnus vulgaris

Starling

5

Anas platyrhynchos

Mallard

6

Parus major

Great Tit

7

Falco peregrinus

Peregrine falcon

8

Passer domesticus

House sparrow

9

Columba livia

Pigeon

10

Cyanistes caeruleus

Blue tit

11

Bubo bubo

Eagle Owl

12

Pandion haliaetus

Osprey

13

Erithacus rubecula

Robin

14

Hirundo rustica

Barn Swallow

15

Ardea alba

Great egret

16

Pavo cristatus

Peacock

17

Carduelis carduelis

Goldfinch

18

Turdus merula

Blackbird

19

Alcedo atthis

Kingfisher

20

Ardea cinerea

Grey heron

The global top 20 most well-represented bird species on the Internet, based on data from the new study.

Press Contacts

For more information about the new study and its implications for global conservation, please contact either Dr. Paul Jepson (paul.jepson@ecosulis.co.uk /+44 (0)7741669822) or Professor Richard Ladle (richardjamesladle@gmail.com/+55 (0) 82 8107 6770).

About Ecosulis

As a leading ecological consultancy and contractor, Ecosulis restores habitats and enhances biodiversity at sites across the United Kingdom. Underpinned by our investment in cutting edge research, innovation and technology, we work on landscape-scale projects that support wild nature, add value for our clients and benefit wider society. Our proprietary culturomics tool is just one of many specialised services that we offer. For more details, please visit www.ecosulis.co.uk.

About the University of Alagoas

Located in the city of Maceió, the Federal University of Alagoas (Universidade Federal de Alagoas) is the major university in the coastal state Alagoas and one of the main research centres in northeastern Brazil.